The objective of this research is the development and evaluation of a system, called MEDINQUIRY, that will allow physicians personal access to patient medical data through natural language queries to support both patient management and clinical research. A prototype MEDINQUIRY system has been implemented for a small data base on malignant melanoma. The physician can input queries in English that retrieve specified data for particular patients or for groups of patients satisfying certain characteristics, that perform simple calculations, that allow browsing through the data base, and that assist in identifying relationships among attributes.